Al‑Jar thumma al‑Dar

Al-Jār thumma al-dār, literally "the neighbor, then the house", is a phrase derived from a well-known hadith attributed to Fatimat al-Zahra (a). It is narrated from Imam al-Hasan (as) that his mother spent the night of a Friday in worship, praying extensively for believing men and women by name, but not praying for herself. When he asked why she did not pray for herself as she did for others, she replied: ‘My son, [one should care for] the neighbor before the house.

Al-Shaykh al-Saduq, in chapter 145 of Ilal al-Sharayi', transmits two narrations with separate chains of transmission that include the phrase "al-jar thumma al-dar." The first is narrated from Imam al-Hasan (a), and the second from Imam al-Kazim (a) on the authority of his forefathers; the two reports show no significant difference in content. Al-Hurr al-'Amilī considers it recommended to pray for other believers before praying for oneself, and he devotes a chapter to this practice in Wasa'il al-Shi'a, citing these two narrations as evidence for his view.

Sayyid Ali Khan Madani, in his lexicon, has included this sentence with a different nuance among the proverbs concerning neighbors. According to him, this proverb points to the importance of knowing one's neighbor before settling in a place or purchasing a house. In hadith collections such as al‑Kafi and Tuhaf al‑'Uqul, there is a statement from Imam 'Ali (a) regarding the importance of the neighbor before choosing a house, whose wording also resembles the expression attributed to Lady Fatima (a).

Mahdi Mihrizi, a scholar of hadith studies, has emphasized the necessity of considering the context in which a hadith was issued in order to understand the meaning of such traditions that share common wording. The author of al‑Ikhtisas reports from al‑Awza'i, a Sunni scholar, admonitions of Luqman the Wise to his son, which also includes the phrase ‘al‑jar thumma al‑dar’ (‘the neighbor before the house’).

Mystics and poets such as Attar of Nishapur and Al-Ghazali have attributed the phrase "al-jar thumma al-dar" to Rabia al-Adawiyya, a devout woman of the 2nd/8th century. Some scholars, citing hadith sources and the statements of Lady Fatima (a), have rejected this claim. Mystics, however, have interpreted the meaning of this expression as God's preference over paradise and sincerity in worship.